Paul from infrared must has surely had a terrible experience in the past jumping on some flavor of the month, but then being horribly burned when that flavor lost taste and he was stuck without the flexibility to solve the problems at hand.

Buy who hasn't? Most of us have experienced jumping on the wrong bandwagon only to be end up in a dead-end situation and the feeling of being abandoned. Experiences like that leaves scars.

We deal with those scars by building survival rules like "don't trust something until it's been around for years (or you will be burned again)". In some regards these survival rules help us navigate the world at a greater pace because they can serve as filters for what should be deserving.

If I switched to using the Next Big Thing, only to find that the thing we need to do to keep Client X happy is actually impossible or fraught with bugs, we're fucked. You need total flexibility, because no matter how smart they think they are, the designers of any web application framework can never have thought of everything.

In other words, he's tempted to play with new technology, but the survival rule is telling him not to — don't mess with something that works, the promises are false (like the last time). The source of this provocation is outlined in the introduction:

A lot of people (especially people who submit stories to Slashdot) are going doolally about Ruby on Rails, the Next Big Thing in web application development. You can't read a blog without someone going on about it like it's the second coming. The end of PHP/J2EE/mod_perl/python/blah! Everything before it is shit! It makes everything so easy! Why on earth are you using anything else, ever, at all? You web development savages!

Leaving aside the internal amplification of the original messages that Paul applies in his understanding (that's an interesting topic for another time), I believe what he's hearing is the voice of a lot of people violating his survival rule around adopting new technology.

That's a challenge, which can be dealt with either by reexamining the survival rule (and asking whether it's helpful to apply it in this case or not) or by distancing himself from the source of the challenge, so as to render it invalid (it doesn't apply to me).

Paul picked the latter and uses a "there are two kind of people" dichotomy to describe why the challenge doesn't apply to him (and thus why the survival rule can still work). The split is centered around "...hype about whatever the Latest Cool Thing is for building pointless web sites and the needs of people like myself, who build web applications professionally".

We have the Bad Technologists (using Latest Cool for pointless web sites):

I wonder how many people are getting hold of RoR, understanding it a bit, using it to write a piss-poor CMS for their weblog or a widget engine, and then never using it again.

These people obviously don't care about the important issues that the Good Technologists follow:

I wonder how many people like me, who rely on the tools they use to be mature, stable and (above all) familiar, in order to Get Stuff Done, when there's never enough hours in the day and the site's going live tomorrow or they pull the contract.

With the world divided into good and bad, it's not hard to pick the side of the good. And thus, it's safe to render the conservative, survival rule-preserving conclusion:

Meanwhile, I stick to mod_perl and Stuff That Works because the track record gives me faith in its persistence. I'm not playing at this, it's my livelihood, so jumping horses onto an unknown runner isn't a risk I feel I should take.

What do I make of this? First of all, that it's not really or at all about Rails. This is a fundamental defense mechanism that any new technology, development approach, and way of thinking will encounter. So in that sense, I consider it a sign of good things when we force survival rules to be invoked (and subsequently examined). That's definitely the first step.

The second step is of course to figure out how to help people make more informed decisions, so they have better grounds on which to decide whether the survival rule is helping or hurting them.

So. I won't try to convince Paul with my own words just now. Instead, I'll let Mike Clark attempt to address the issue of flexibility in the Rails world. He has a wonderful piece called Dumpster-Diving Rails, here's a snippet:

I'd also encourage you to study the Rails code just for fun. There's a lot of incredibly cool stuff going on in there, and just reading the code will make you a better Ruby programmer. You shouldn't be afraid to take a peek; it's good code. Being able to read, tweak, and run the Rails code with ease drastically lowers the price of participation.

In much the same way that the web took off because of "View Source", Rails is taking off because it lowers the barrier to entry and holds nothing back.

(If you want to read more about survival rules, I can recommend the writings of Jerry Weinberg — the Quality Software Management series and the Secrets of Consulting series deals with them at length)

I don't know about you, but survival rules that preach ultra conservative behavior in our ever changing field, just feels wrong, very wrong.

My survival rule on this matter would be much more to keep my radar very alert and be always experimenting in my 'private research lab', outside professional projects, until I feel confident using the next big thing in a professional job to differentiate myself from the competition that will rather stick to the old stuff that works.

For me, that's surviving attitude. I mean, if humanity didn't have this hability to quickly adapt, we wouldn't be here right?

Challenge by Anonymous Coward on June 24, 15:53

The way you go after anti-Rails postings on obscure weblogs is just plain creepy.

I think Paul is representative of a large group of people and thus analyzing his concerns is an aggregated analysis of the larger group. On top, what makes someones weblog obscure? I think labels like that is exactly what causes people to see the whole A, B, C list blogger divide (and rightfully so claim that its unhealthy).

Oh course, I should know better than to feed anonymous trolls, but there you go regardless ;)

Challenge by Eelco on June 24, 17:01

Let's face it, experienced (rusted) webdevelopers have not much to nothing to gain from RoR and a whole lot to lose. It's not the lack of new stuff that makes the change hard, it's about everything that you need to leave behind.

Talking about this defense mechanism will not make it go away and indefinitely boils down to a matter of opinion.

While I follow all the ongoing buzz about Rails with great interest, for the company that I work for it's simply not interesting (yet). Making the switch would probably cost as much as there's to gain.

But don't despair, the 'best' product is almost never the most popular ;)

David, just keep trucking on. Most all of us face the issues that Paul raises, but there are simply great reasons why so many of us are excited again about web development. It's because of Ruby/Rails. Those who are excited simply chose to believe once again, despite the risks, odds, or potential pain.

As for the " using it to write a piss-poor CMS for their weblog or a widget engine, and then never using it again" bit, well we're working on that over at RailFrog. Paul's welcome to join in and enlighten us with his expertise (Is it me or does he sound like he's projecting just a little bit :)

Anyway, thanks for taking the risk and time to do something great David. Keep it up.

I agree with Dema. I settle in on a stable set of of tools, but constantly watch for anything better. When something promising appears, I'll play with it and, if warranted, do a trial project or two. Once proven, swicthing tools is an easy decision.

Eelco said: "Let's face it, experienced (rusted) webdevelopers have not much to nothing to gain from RoR and a whole lot to lose. It's not the lack of new stuff that makes the change hard, it's about everything that you need to leave behind."

I agree with this. What this means is that anything that you might switch to has to not just be better, but be enough better to be worth giving up your current assets. This is precisely why I an still using Windows (although I've been trying to switch for years, the critical mass has not yet been reached).

Robert, you missed the point. My view is that amongst all the hype, there is a premature sentiment of "Hey! This is fantastic! Why isn't everyone using this for everything? [Name of old web development framework] sucks!" which, if left unchecked, could lead to the wrong people making the wrong decisions about what they need to use to fulfil the requirements of a professional project.

I'm saying there is an enourmous difference between the factors that influence the decisions you need to make in building exciting, community-lead, offbeat web applications in your spare time, and the real-world, big-business, ecommerce, people-are-paying-for-this-guys applications. One of those differing factors is the amount of certainty and faith you need to have that the stuff you're building your app with is rock-solid, unlikely to change and break stuff, and comes with a level of support and a knowledgebase that you can depend on - even more important if the tools are open-source (as they should be).

The impression I've been left with so far from some of the RoR community is that their framework is the best evar, and those J2EE/mod_perl guys are, like, dinosaurs...

Seriously, I don't want to sound discouraging about RoR, I just think certain areas of the fanboydom need to wake up and realise why people/companies are sticking with the stuff their using rather than throwing it all out of the window and using the flavour of the month. If RoR bears out, great! But let's see.